Research prospective

Nigel Poole offers 10 glimpses of what Australian life science commercialisation could look like in 2015.

* Research investment by agribiotech and biotech industry has caught up with OECD benchmarks.

* A fragmenting global pharma industry 'rediscovers' Australian research and the Australian biotech industry as a relatively untapped resource of innovative new products.

* Two or three global agribiotech companies have set up R&D labs on the ground in Australia to work alongside state and federal labs.

* Building on its strengths, Australia becomes part of the first line of defence against emerging diseases with US and EU funding providing for early detection, antiviral and vaccine research.

* Two new investment subsectors have emerged: private and publicly listed companies in the use of biotechnology for remediation of degraded and polluted ecosystems, and the use of biotechnologies for industrial processes and production.

* Licensing revenue, milestones and success payments have flowed to endow several publicly-funded labs in Australia.

* Five blockbuster therapeutic products that originated in Australia are on the market worldwide -- but unfortunately only two are delivering financial benefit to Australia, as the other three have been taken over during development by US and European pharmaceutical companies.

* IP laws have changed to define and authorise research use licences, but much stronger protection is available to protect inventors' rights in commercial use. Research licences explicitly foreshadow authorised use and protect against unauthorised commercial exploitation, and the damages for wilful patent infringement are the same as in the US -- triple damages.

* Australian universities, teaching hospitals and independent research institutes have implemented uniform standard agreements for confidentiality, materials transfer, testing and consulting agreements.

* Australia has established itself as an international base for clinical research -- access to most ethnicities, comparatively cheap, caps on liability, great technical and clinical expertise.

Nigel Poole is the director of commercialisation at CSIRO. These glimpses are his personal views -- not strategy or policy views held by CSIRO or by the federal government.